Keywords can make or break the success of your SEO strategy. It’s difficult to drive traffic that converts if you’re website doesn’t appear for important terms people are commonly searching. If you enjoy earning more revenue, learn how to choose keywords for your website to boost the number of leads and conversions.

Choose the most descriptive search terms

Did you know that 15% of the searches Google processes are completely unique search terms? There are billions of searches made each and every day so that should give you an idea of the massive number of word combinations that people are using.

Such a fascinating statistic! I wonder what was newly searched today?

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) May 12, 2018

That stat is still correct. That's why we continue to cite it.

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) August 27, 2020

It should also give you an idea about how people are searching. Long-tail keywords make up about 70% of total searches. Short-tail keywords or seed keywords may have some of the largest search volumes, but due to the vagueness of true search intent, they aren’t exactly the words you would target for your website because they don’t convert as well.

Optimizing for long-tail keywords can drive more targeted traffic because the visitors are looking for something more specific (specified in your long-tail key phrase).

For example, pretend you owned a website that sold cotton cut-off t-shirts. There’s no doubt that ranking on the first page for the keyword t-shirts would bring you business.

The truth is though that this short-tail keyword represents a lot of people that are looking for all different types of t-shirts.

Even if you ranked on the first page you may be driving a lot of unwanted traffic to your website. Not everyone who types t-shirts is looking for cotton cut-off t-shirts. 

You might get 80K people on your website but if you dont have what they’re looking for they’re going to bounce off your website anyway. Add this problem on to the challenge of ranking a difficult keyword and there’s a lot of wasted time and resources going towards a keyword that isn’t perfectly suited to your website.

It’s better to get 100 out of 1000 people buying your product opposed to 50 people out of 10,000 people on your site. At the end of the day, good SEO is getting people to exactly what theyre looking for when they search a keyword.

Use tools to find important metrics

One way to go about finding the best search term for your business is to use Google’s Keyword Planner. Why not get some keywords ideas straight from the horse’s mouth?

Another highly recommended alternative is SEMRush. Even if you’re not going to be using the tool to great lengths, they offer a free version that will provide you with a great base for finding useful keywords for your website.

When you go through keyword ideas, you’re looking for the keyword with a good balance between low competition, high search volume, and high business value.

Assess the competition

When you assess whether the keyword you’re choosing is right for your business you should have an idea of the how important the keyword is to your business. Where does it fit into your strategy? This is important to know because it will determine how hard you’re willing to fight for a first page position.

Most analytic software tools will show you a value for the strength of the competition. For example, SEMRush has a column with a value for keyword difficulty.

This value (along with every other third party analytic tool) will base the difficulty of a keyword on the number and quality of backlinks it has pointing to the page. One tool that’s particularly good at giving you a quick glance at some of these metrics is the Mozbar that can be dowloaded as a browser extension.

Moz derives page authority and domain authority from the backlinks pointing to the page and domain respectively. This tool will also indicate the number of backlinks that a page has pointing to it.

When you want to assess the competitiveness of a keyword, you need to search for the keyword and analyse the first page of results. Using this extension will inform you about the difficulty it would take to rank on the backlink profile of the competing pages.

Keep in mind that the backlinks of a page is only one part of determining how a page is ranking. There are other factors that also need to be assessed but having this information at your disposal is one way to get a quick glimpse at the kind of strength other sites are demonstrating.

Maximize the search volume

As Tim Soulo, CEO of Ahrefs put it, “Search volume is a vanity metric.” What good is high search volume if none of the visitors on your site convert into paying clients? We all want high volumes of traffic BUT the traffic needs to be from keywords that represent what your future clients are using in searches to find the solutions you offer.

High search volume in one industry may not be that high in another industry. For example, a plastic surgeon may do very well with a website that gets 1000 visitors a month from legitimately interested clients. A website that sells poop bags for dogs won’t make that much money even if every one of those 1000 visitors all buy poop bags.

Every industry has its own standard for what high volumes of traffic are. It’s important to know what the value of traffic is in your industry to make better decisions on keyword you wish to pursue. This can be infinitely easier when you’ve assigned a business value to your keywords.

Choose high business value keywords

Keywords that drive traffic that converts are considered to have a high business value. For every keyword that you target, you need to identify the true search intent behind the keyword. This will give you a clear idea of whether a visitor will be likely to use your product or service.

In order to rank on the first page of Google for any keyword, your content needs to satisfy the true intent of the search. Google won’t rank a page that serves the user no purpose for the keyword they’ve used to search. Even if they did, if too many users bounce from the ranking page, that page is demoted.

The key point here is that in order to determine the value of your keyword, you need to understand what the user truly wants and expects to find when they type it.

Once you have this aspect covered in planning your content, you can assess the impact your content will have on a users decision to purchase your product or service. If a user is likely to feel like they need what you offer, then it would make sense to pursue the keyword because it has high business value.

If the user doesn’t feel that they need your product or service after reading your content, then that keyword has low business value.

Commercial value short cut

You can take a short cut to assigning value to a keyword by finding the top bid that publishers are willing to paying to get one click from the traffic a keyword represents. If you look at the cost-per-click (CPC) on Google Keyword Planner, or any other tool, you can get an idea the value of that keyword.

For example, bail bondsmen are willing to pay anywhere from $40 to $120 per click for some keywords because they know they’re going to make more money from the conversion. It would make sense to optimize for those keywords because the raffic is obviosuly making the publisher money.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you may not want to pursue a keyword that has $0.00 CPC value because it’s obvious no one is making money from that keyword since no one is paying for that traffic.

Again, like anything in SEO this should be included in your keyword analysis as one of the many indicators as to whether a keyword is valuable to your website.

Be logical, rational and analytical with your keyword selection

Choosing keywords isn’t extremely difficult, but it should be done only after careful consideration. Choose the keywords that play a role in your overall keyword strategy and contribute to driving traffic with visitors that convert to clients.

If you’ve been keeping tabs on Google, you would know it’s continuously been modifying the first page of results to accommodate users in finding what they want. One of the most notable developments has been rich results.

What are rich results?

Rich results are almost everything that’s not a blue link. They are enhanced results that Google uses to highlight specific features on the search engine result page. Rich results are favoured because they draw additional attention to the listing.

There are rich results that Google puts together itself that we have no control over. Depending on the search, you might see shopping ads, sitelinks to a website and Google news are just to name a few.

What rich results benefit your business?

Despite the random appearance of Google rich results, there are a few ways that we get your site to appear as rich results. The end result of a rich result is a higher click-through rate to your website and a boost to the monthly traffic your site receives.

Not all rich results can be achieved the same way, so we’ll detail a few different features that we commonly aim to get our clients to appear for in a search result.

FAQ rich result

Here’s one of the newer releases where Google has disclosed the structured data required to make your site eligible for a frequently asked question rich result.

Offering the answers to frequently asked questions has a number of advantages, but most notably is the ability to add links within the answers. This gives publishers the opportunity to offer internal links to their site-all from one search result.

This can work to a company’s favour in most situations but in the case of product sales, this was a huge opportunity for businesses to use long-form content to rank for keywords and yet still be able to offer a link to their products.

During the first stages of implementation one publisher was able to see an increase of 2.75% in his click-through rate to product pages.

FAQ schema is also a way to brand your company as an expert in its field. The rich result takes up a large chunk of space on the SERP and pushes the competition further down the page.

When used correctly the FAQ rich result is sure to get more attention from users within the SERP, which results in more traffic to your site.

The Local Pack

Google’s local finder has created a monumental shift in the way local businesses are found and because the feature only displays the top three results, it makes your local SEO strategy more important than ever.

Getting into the local pack is never a guaranteed thing but by incorporating some of the most important aspects of local SEO you can rank your site to the top positions. Moz published a very informative graph of the most important ranking factors that go into ranking organically as well as local ranking factors.

Some things have changed since then, and the 2020 Report On The  State Of Local SEO will confirm that factors like on-page optimization are now weighing in heavier to get your company in the local pack.

This fact has led fake business names that are keyword stuffed in order to get search visibility. It’s a rampant issue that has a lot of people stumped, as keyword stuffing was believed to be a thing of the past. Right, Google?

To appear in the local pack companies need to have a complete and optimized Google My Business listing. Google extracts most of its data about your company from this profile and uses it whenever applicable in keyword searches.

A strong local presence is also key in creating strong relevance to search terms that include a specific city. Creating local links and publishing local content make up a large part of the ranking signals that will get your website into the Local Pack.

Reviews and ratings

If you’re looking at a search result and one of the results has five stars right under the title-wouldn’t you be drawn to take a closer look? This type of rich result can be created by implementing the correct schema through structured data markup.

Highly reviewed sites will always get better click-through rates than websites that have little to no reviews. This type of markup is only available to websites in specific niches.

The featured snippet

Google has slowly increased the appearance of this feature since 2015. The featured snippet, also known as position zero, is the most prominent feature on the SERP because it’s typically shown as the first thing a user sees when searching a query.

The featured snippet is often put together by Google itself in an effort to provide the user with the most comprehensive answer in summary form. You can optimize to appear in the snippet but there’s no guarantee Google will select your page to feature in this position.

The featured snippet leads to higher click-through rates and is an excellent way to brand your company. It’s position and enhanced appearance give your company more presence in the SERP which translates to the perception of having expertise in your field.

People Also Ask Box

The PAA boxes are Google’s way of providing a series of questions that are directly related to your search query. This feature is similar to the featured snippet in the sense that you can win another spot on the SERP for your website. The click-through rates from PAA boxes are the main benefit as well as the boost in branding.

Optimizing for the PAA is as simple as using H-tags for headings and phrasing them as questions. Write your answer to the question directly underneath in less than 60 words and you’re eligible to appear in one of these snippets.

The beauty of the PAA box is that, unlike the featured snippet, you don’t have to be on the first page of Google to appear in the featured position. Your pages can appear in the PAA box as long as they’re optimized and have some credibility to back up your content (links and website traffic to your pages).

How-to schema

Although it’s not as common in the search results, implementing the How-to schema in your content can create a stunning and attractive display for users to click on.

If you’re in a competitive industry where there are a lot of sites publishing how-to content, this can be the competitive edge you need to set yourself apart from the rest of the SERP. 

Keep in mind that SEO is about traffic generation. Although your ranking can go up and down, this type of markup can attract the click from wherever you are on the first page of results (yes, most rich results only work on the first page of search results).

SItelinks

Have you ever searched for a company and seen a bunch of different links to its pages be featured in the search result? Those are what Google calls sitelinks rich results.

Although there’s no official markup to implement to get these to appear if you have the most important elements of navigation implemented on your site it helps Google to figure out what pages are the most important.

Sitelinks can help your company because they take users to inner pages on your site faster, reducing the chance they bounce from your site from not finding what they wanted. Google will typically show these when it deems it’s beneficial to the user.

Rich results add to the number of visitors on your site

When it comes down to marketing, rich results are considered a tool for marketing your website pages in the SERP. They are exactly what they sound like; enhanced search results.

Take every opportunity to use schema and structured data markup to enhance the way your pages look in a search result. Improving your click-through rates a few percentages in a few different places contributes to more revenue on a regular basis.

As an SEO company, we’ve seen the many different faces of Google; Google the merciful, Google the kind, Google the generous and Google the vengeful. For the most part, if you can manage to not anger the Google gods you are allowed passage into the first page of search results. When you’re on the first page of Google, there are many reasons why Google loves your website.

We are very aware of what Google doesn’t like, as well as what Google loves. In fact, we’re so good at making Google happy, we want to share with you a few ways we make Google love your website.

Answers search intent

In case you hadn’t thought this one through completely, it should be noted that a search engine company’s product is information. Therefore, Google loves your site because you’re able to satisfy the true intent of a search.

Think about it. If you performed a search on Google and the search results turned up 10 completely useless websites, wouldn’t you try another search engine? If you can’t find what you want, why would you continue to use the same search engine?

It is for this reason alone that Google (and every other search engine) strives to find the very best answers to search queries. If you want Google to love your site and display it on the first page of results, it needs to be the best response to a query.

When the content on your site can completely satisfy what a user is searching for, you have satisfied search intent. This is one of the most important aspects of earning Google-love and a position on the first page of results.

Perfect on-page optimization

Google loves crawling pages with perfectly balanced keyword placement. It is delighted to see a page where the keywords are obvious and yet there is no keyword stuffing or instances of forcing the keyword into a sentence.

When your page reads naturally it’s more enjoyable for users since it isn’t blatantly stuffed with keywords. Google made it extremely clear in both Panda and Hummingbird update that keyword stuffing was a dead practice. Quality content reigns supreme and search engines no longer respond favourably to the number of times a keyword is repeated.

Having your keyword placed in the title, URL and a few times in the body of your content is enough to put it on Google’s radar. Google loves your website because the content on your page is of the highest quality with your keyword sprinkled in all the right places.

There’s so much more to on-page optimization than keyword placement. Here is Moz’s depiction of the many factors that need to be considered to create an optimized page:

Topically organized

Google loves your website because of the depth you demonstrate in your area of expertise. Topic clusters are a way to organize the content on your website and implement an interlinking structure that ties ideas and themes together.

Topic clusters promote higher click-through rates, longer dwell time which are positive user engagement statistics. Since Google is all about the user experience, it rewards websites that are topically organized.

Fast page speed

Since the mobile update in 2015, Google has made it clear that fast page speed can play a significant role in the experience your website provides. Not only do you lose visitors the longer it takes your page to load, but your ranking may suffer should your page speed be exceedingly slow.

Google loves your website because it’s lightning-quick and loads under 2 seconds. This keeps visitors on your site and promotes positive ranking signals.

Has a Secure Sockets Layer

Google loves your site because it operates on a secure sockets layer making it safe for all users who land on your pages. HTTPS is the encrypted protocol that has been adopted by roughly 80% of websites after it was clear your site would be marked as “not secure” on Google Chrome.

This protocol is the industry standard for all websites and Google loves your website because you have an SSL certificate to make it HTTPS. When your site is safe for users you’ll see the lock beside your URL.

No technical errors

A sign of a well-maintained website is one that generates a minimal number of errors. Google loves technically sound websites that use 301 redirections for deleted pages in order to eliminate 404 errors.

Avoiding 301 redirection chains is also highly recommended to maintain your websites PageSpeed. Performing a monthly technical audit maintains Google’s love for your website when you can identify errors as they appear. The accumulation of too many sitewide errors will send your site backwards in the search results.

All of your links bring interested visitors

Google takes link building very seriously because this aspect of SEO can be used to manipulate ranking. Google loves your website because the links you’ve built from other websites bring traffic filled with engaged visitors. 

This is an incredibly good sign because it shows Google that the external websites linking to your own are sharing valuable, quality content that is being confirmed by high user engagement.

Links from external sites that have little to no traffic will not have as big an impact on your website as links from sites that have high volumes of traffic. The second bonus is that if visitors are spending time on your site from these backlinks it shows Google that the links are highly relevant and not fabricated for manipulating ranking.

Google loves websites that acquire backlinks naturally from credible websites with high authority. Links of this nature will make a difference in moving your website closer to the top of Google’s search results.

Stay in Google’s good graces

When it comes to perfecting the optimization of your website to rank highly, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is it’s impossible to account for each and every ranking factor that search engines use in its algorithm. The good news is, you don’t need to.

You only need a few of the major factors that are required in order to achieve top positions in the search results. Above all, be the best answer to a search query by satisfying search intent. Once you’ve achieved this aspect, the rest is fine-tuning and adjusting to outperform your competition.

Google will more than likely be the main source for high-converting traffic for some time to come. Stay within Google’s best practice guidelines and cater to the user experience for long-lasting love from Google’s search engine.

The game is Google and the players are every business that has a website. Are you winning or losing the race to the top of the search engines? If you’re paying for traffic, you could be making a lot more money by ranking organically. Even if you’re already experiencing organic traffic there are many reasons why every business needs an SEO Consultant.

Analysis

Your website generates an enormous amount of data that can be used to assess its performance in a number of categories. An SEO consultant gives you a better understanding of how things are working and how they can be improved.

Technical SEO

Having an SEO consultant looking for ways to improve your traffic leads to the correction of technical errors that could be affecting your ranking. Technical SEO is a much more common problem with larger websites, but there are dozens of cases where smaller sites are critically affected by a technical issue.

Search engines need to be able to crawl and index the pages on your website for them to show up-let alone rank in the search results. There are dozens of potential things that can lead to a page, or multiple pages failing to be indexed. An SEO consultant is a person who finds and fixes the problem.

Even issues such as page speed can be the reason why your website is losing visitors when they land on your pages. If you don’t have a person on your team monitoring the bounce rate on your landing pages, you may not be able to source and correct the issue. (Click here to test your page speed)

Optimization

The optimization of your website takes on several different aspects such as performance optimization, on-page optimization and off-page optimization. If your business is directly impacted by the traffic it receives on your website, it would make sense to optimized to preform in every category.

On-page optimization

Through keyword research and competitive analysis, an SEO specialist identifies the most important aspects of satisfying search intent and qualifying your website as the best result of a keyword search. It helps to know about the industry, however, reverse engineering the top-ranking pages gives SEOs enough information to create pages that outperform the competition.

Off-page optimization

The strength of a website’s backlink profile contributes to the authority and credibility of website content. When a lot of credible websites link to a page, it indicates the popularity of the page, which results in a higher ranking. Sounds simple, but because this is so well known, link building has become increasingly scrutinized and cautionary practice.

An SEO professional is experienced in link building. They can assess the current optimization of your website’s backlink profile and determine what links are needed to move your site higher in the search results. The ability to recognize a low-quality link and a link that will benefit your site is a valuable skillset that saves time and money for your business.

Performance optimization

There are many ways to drive traffic from the first page of results. An SEO specialist will improve the number of ways the pages on your site are optimized. Adding structured data for rich results and optimizing for SERP features can land your page a featured position on the first page of Google.

Having your page appear as a rich result or featured in a PAA box or snippet will increase the click-through rate to your website and lead to more traffic.

Adapt to change

The search landscape is constantly changing and evolving, along with Google’s algorithm. When you have a consultant on top of the latest updates and changes in the search industry you keep a sharper competitive edge.

For example, FAQ schema was released in May 2019 which has been proven in many cases to improve click-through rates. If your consultant recognized the benefits you would be one of the few websites to incorporate this feature on your pages.

The separation from your competition on the SERP leads to better branding and has a lasting impact on your potential customers. Being an industry leader and a recognized brand has proven to be one of the most powerful marketing advantages in converting visitors into clients.

Outperform the standard

It’s widely understood that SEO is similar to a race and those that are most consistent (and strategic) end up in the top positions. Much of the strategy for achieving top rankings is formed from research and an analysis of what is working to achieve those rankings.

An SEO consultant constantly looks to outperform the standard. And when you’re in the top spot, it’s your company that sets the standard. With an effective and documented strategy, your company can outperform the standard and continue to grow.

Increased revenue and growth

At the end of the day SEO is about the growth of your company through increased revenue. The law of averages suggests that if you’re generating income from the traffic your website is driving, an increase in traffic will increase revenue.

Search engine optimization takes into account every aspect of website performance that affects the quality of your traffic. It identifies the visitors who are engaging the most with your content and who are most likely to buy.

SEO identifies the keywords that are most valuable as well as those that aren’t converting to leads and new clients. This affects the content you publish and the amount of resources you allocate to specific campaigns.

An SEO consultant is your guide to making more money through your website and is an invaluable asset in determining the direction you take with your online marketing strategy.